director’s Letter

“I speak of change not on the surface but in the depth— change in the sense of renewal.”

- James Baldwin, 1962

one of the peculiarities of the past academic year is and will always be the way memory breaks before and after coVId-19— and the way that the murder of george Floyd reset what poet adrienne rich called north american time and with it, global time as well.

Before those world-changing tears in the fabric of our times, IPrh was immersed in its annual rhythms and tempos. our Fellows seminar, themeless in this cycle, gathered some of the most exciting interdisciplinary humanities work on campus. From “writing brains” to blind cinema, from histories of vision to maps of place in multiple memory-scapes, from indigeneity in Philadelphia to digital media in manila and Los angeles—this is just a taste of the range and creativity of research projects that generated engagement and argument in the seminar over the course of the year.

our research clusters bore witness to an equally impressive variety of creative initiatives. two of these, community healing and resistance through storytelling (c-hearts) and medical humanities, were addressing the social, political, racial and affective aspects of the biomedical long before the 2020 pandemic threw these dimensions of health and well-being into such bold and devastating relief. nor was undergraduate research far from our minds this past year. We began in august with a faculty/staff retreat, in collaboration with the office of undergraduate research, designed to showcase models for humanities research and to explore how we should shape a future of undergraduate research that re-centers the importance of the humanities in 21st century undergraduate education at Illinois. a faculty working group ensued, which met valiantly through the spring and generated talking points and models we plan to socialize more broadly in the coming year. and thanks to the generosity of several donors, we had several undergraduate interns working in the office—one of whom, Issy marquez, traveled to Washington, d.c. with a cohort of Illinois faculty for national humanities advocacy day (see page 22).

our programming this past year was more collaborative than ever, starting with urbana native and world-acclaimed drag queen sasha Velour, who came to campus in september through the combined support of the Krannert center for the Performing arts (KcPa), the department of theatre, the center for advanced study and IPrh. In addition to debuting her new show, “smoke and mirrors,” at KcPa and speaking in various school settings in town, sasha held over 50 undergraduates in rapt conversation during an Inside scoop at Levis, coorganized with the LgBt resource center. there, students from theatre and music and english and beyond had the chance to hear her talk about growing up queer in east central Illinois and about drag as methodology. sasha was the first of three successive Inside scoop lunches, the second with community activist, writer and filmmaker satsuki Ina, whose visit and screening of And Then They Came for Us and talk in collaboration with asian-american studies brought the history of Japanese-american internment home, and into the same frame as contemporary immigration debates, in vivid and memorable ways. Last but not least, undergraduates were treated to an hour of conversation with anna deveare smith in our February Inside scoop. she held us spellbound through her frank and unflinching discussion of being an african american woman artist in these times, as she had the night before during her performance at KcPa and the evening after during a culture talk event with composer Julia Wolfe and the college of Fine and applied arts’ own Lisa gaye dixon.

through these and other spring events, momentum was gathering when the pandemic hit and Illinois effectively shut down in midmarch. most disappointing was the ramp-up, already begun with deveare smith, to our Year of creative Writers 2020, a showcase of brilliant artists slated to come to campus across the whole calendar year. We were just able to hear a joint reading by Luis urrea and meagan cass, our talented colleagues from university of Illinois chicago and university of Illinois springfield respectively, at the urbana Free Library and the Illini union Bookstore, before campus was peremptorily closed.

Luis urrea

“ The reading corner in the bookstore was full to the brim with students, and Luis and Meagan were both luminous. It’s a memory of what seems like another life at this distance and it therefore burns especially bright.”

though we’ve had to reschedule most of our Year of creative Writers events (see page 17), we are planning to carry on with several public readings this academic year, including a residency by Pulitzer-Prize winner tyehimba Jess this coming april. meanwhile, our collaboration with Professor Janice harrington and the creative Writing Program in this project, which is funded by the Presidential Initiative celebrating the

as the pandemic bore down and we were lucky enough to be able to work from home during the last half of the spring semester, we kept focused on the very real human suffering brought on and exacerbated by coVId-19, generating a long list of local, national, regional and international organizations through which IPrh friends and colleagues could learn about and help those who needed it. We also kept our odyssey students’ education going remotely, thanks to the hard work of our faculty and staff and the determination of the students themselves.

meanwhile, it’s not too much to say that humanists tend to study “underlying conditions” if not also co-morbidities, and that many among our Fellows and research cluster leaders past and present have had a lot to say across a range of social media about the importance of history, literature, the medical humanities, critical race studies and more for understanding the current crises. the murder of george Floyd serves as an index for the killing of so many Black americans before and after may 2020; his death will long be remembered as inaugurating one of the most convulsive moments in world history. the relationship between anti-Black racism in this country and public health is clearly no mere metaphor—as many of our Black colleagues and colleagues of color at Illinois have been researching, writing, teaching and agitating about for many years. the work of the humanities has been a fulcrum for both studying and acting on these issues. Yet humanists are not exempt from critique and humanism is not self-evidently anti-racist.

race, Place and the Politics of census panel

“ What’s called for is a new, newly vocational commitment to rethinking the humanities as an institutional practice dedicated to ending racism, and all forms of erasure and exclusion and violence, now.”

If the future of anti-racism is here, the timing of change is unpredictable. as many of you know, in June the Illinois Program for research in the humanities (IPrh) relaunched as the humanities research Institute (hrI). this was a process long in the planning, from approval by the academic senate and the Board of trustees to official recognition by the Illinois Board of higher education. this new status brings us into line with other campus institutes—and would not have been possible without the support of the offices of the Provost and the Vice chancellor for research and Innovation, to whom we are very grateful. For more on hrI and our advancement to institute status, see page 5. more good news followed in midsummer, when humanities Without Walls—now a 16-partner consortium funded by the andrew W. mellon Foundation and headquartered at hrI—was renewed at $5 million for another five years (see page 13). this most recent mellon grant followed on our receipt of a grant, also from mellon, for our Interseminars initiative in interdisciplinary graduate training awarded this past fall (see page 4).

If the summer of 2020 is a sobering moment for such re-starts, it’s also an opportunity to recommit to first principles: to insist on the urgency and indispensability of a critical humanities framework —socially just and racially equitable by design—as the sine qua non of any and all projects aimed at shaping what is here and what is to come.

our programming this coming year is organized in part around our annual theme, the global and its Worlds, in collaboration with the newly established Illinois global Institute, with support from director Jerry davila and Professor colleen murphy. this seems an uncannily opportune moment to scrutinize the global and to ask what it can, does and should mean now, and for whom. our theme-related fall talks include one on the white settler colonial context of the pandemic in new Zealand by tony Ballantyne and another by arjun appadurai on the markets for globalization. In a spirit of openness, even and especially in a pandemic, the Fellows seminar will welcome participants beyond the Fellows themselves (via yearlong preregistration) for the first time in its twenty three-year history, albeit remotely on Zoom.

We continue to work with campus and community partners—PYgmaLIon and WggP again, and american Indian studies—to sponsor programming that trains the energetic and critical eye of interdisciplinary humanities scholars on topics like coVId responses across the world and the work of the land acknowledgement statement. and while our mellon-funded environmental humanities research group, led these last two years by Professor Bob morrissey of history, has concluded, the impact of the programming they did and the campus-wide conversations they hosted lives on in Defining Environments, a publication of undergraduate research essays in environmental humanities, produced when an in-person symposium became an impossibility, and Flatland, an online publication of the 201819 group’s essays on that theme. (For more about the group’s work, see page 11.) as well, Bob and Pollyanna rhee, who has been a mellon environmental humanities Post-doctoral Fellow and is now our colleague in Landscape architecture, will be leading a research cluster that continues to focus on environmental issues in the humanities and related fields.

this fall marks the start of a new two-year theme under the auspices of that same mellon initiative, emerging areas in the humanities: Legal humanities. Led by Professor a. naomi Paik, Legal humanities recognizes law as both reflecting and actively influencing societal values, aspirations, anxieties, biases and notions of justice. naomi has assembled a research team and will lead off with a virtual lecture featuring dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal and cooperating counsel with the center for constitutional rights (ccr), followed later in the semester by a screening and discussion with the filmmakers of The Infiltrators. Keep your eye peeled too for our “out of Isolation” series, where we ask scholars to help us understand how the pandemic

gioconda guerra Perez, International Women’s day celebration

must be recontextualized in a variety of ways lest we see it as disconnected from human-designed, most often racially inequitable, conditions. We plan, too, to support emerging events organized by colleagues near and far that contribute to real, lasting change so that Illinois can be rebuilt more justly, once and for all. Who are we in solidarity with in 2020? and how can renewal be change, not on the surface but in the depth?

“ The questions we ask and the changes we aim for can and must be built on humanities research: the “R” of the new

HRI.”

Whether you are reading about us for the first time or have known about us for several decades, I hope you will consider supporting our work as we face the challenges to come. For more on how you can support hrI in the moment of its launch, see page 24. With many of our events planned as remote ones for the coming academic year, you have a chance to tune in to some of them via Zoom. as always, our calendar on pages 14-15 unfolds a more complete list of what 2020–21 has in store. If you haven’t seen our new website or signed up for our listserv, you can check it out at hri.illinois.edu. Join us as we head with I can’t end without acknowledging the amazing, talented and hardworking staff at hrI, who are the ones who keep everything running and allow hrI to serve humanities research, both out in front and behind the scenes, at Illinois. to stephanie, Jason, Jenna, alaina, erin, michelle and especially nancy—thank you. While they have since moved on to new opportunities, I also want to acknowledge carolyn randolph and Jen hood for their invaluable contributions to hrI’s success. Without you there is no surface or depth, let alone renewal.

I hope that you and yours are safe and sound, and that we can meet in person before too long.

all the best,

Antoinette Burton Professor of history swanlund endowed chair director, humanities research Institute

INTeRSeMINaRS INITIaTIve TO lauNCH IN 2021

hrI was awarded a $2 million grant from the andrew W. mellon Foundation to fund the new Interseminars initiative, which is designed to build communities of inquiry among graduate students and faculty at Illinois around emerging research directions in the interdisciplinary humanities and arts.

In the process, Interseminars will help to prepare graduate students to be adept at both navigating and actively shaping the kind of higher education landscapes and cultures they want to see in the 21st century. the initiative will also support interdisciplinary approaches to research and teaching with a diverse graduate student population at the forefront.

the design for Interseminars is the result of a year of planning by faculty and graduate students who were influenced by elements of Intersect, an earlier pilot program funded by the graduate college from 2012 to 2017. although originally slated to begin in 2020, because of coVId-19 delays, the initiative will begin accepting applications in fall 2021.